Fade
by rendezvous
Summary: [One-shot] 'Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.' Mare reflects in the wake of a devastating loss.


Fade 

AN:  As always, I don't own them.  This is more a tribute to Guardian's Sunshine in Winter, altol's Fire and Ice, and Lanesa than anything else (although they're in totally different fandoms).  Hope you enjoy. 

:::=:::=:::  

Light splashed across the night sky, the faint glimmer of stars and the feather caress of moonlight touching her skin with a coldness that it had never felt before.  _Goddess, hear my prayer.  _It was (_cold_) beautiful, a simple, real rush of pure magic, the stuff made of legends, when so long ago ancient men would point upwards and murmur in awe.  The shower of stars and radiance of angel eyes bloomed in shades of velvet blue and tawny yellow.  It reminded her of something—a whispered promise, a breath of warmth against the side of her neck, his lean hands tender against her skin; the feel of his mind still captured inside her head like a bundle of heat and passion and love and _mate—_

—and he hasn't come back yet.  

_You said you would._

No, she shouldn't act so childishly.  She stood a girl only a year before, a mere slip, so innocent and naïve and trusting.  How could she not have been, in this small town of mouse racing and quiet forests and sleepy life?  But now eighteen had left its mark on her.  She was balanced upon the edge, the thin line between innocence and oblivion.  Her innocence.  

And yet it seemed so much longer.  A year, a damn year.  Only a year and—

_She's sweating, running through mist, but she refuses to scream, because she promised to be strong, stay alive, if only for him, for **him**_

_and_ _the wolf is loping after her, a panting fear in the back of her mind, she can't outrun it, her arms and legs screams the leaves rustle and the grass rustles, in their mocking song, the home of forest is dark and dank and deep and she can't escape behind her a roar of pure fury and perhaps a sliver of hurt_

_how could you I thought you would understand Mare_

_Mare, Mare, my dear Mare_

_"What do they call you, anyway?"_

_She runs blindly, and screams of hurt betrayal hatred blind rage echo and echo and echo until she can't hear she can only stumble onward towards_

_"Mary?  Marylin?  M'lin?  M.L.?"_

_Ash _

_"They call me Mary-Lynette."_

_She's lost she can't find_

_"Oh yeah?  How about M'lin the cursed?"_

_Cursed.  Fear claws at her throat, splinters of pain lodged in her side.  _

You promised 

—_"See you next year!"  Sun woven through strands of hair, eyes soft, tiger stripes, her errant knight_

He didn't come back.

*

They said he was hurt.  Rowan, gentle eyes shadowed with worry.  Kestrel, wild and feral and spitting fury.  Jade, cuddled with Mark, silver tears trembling on delicate lashes, and she couldn't help but feel the twinge of pain.  Jealousy.  Goddess help her, she had been jealous of her little brother—

But they said he was hurt.  Missing.  _Gone._

_Gone.  _Her binoculars had long since dropped from nerveless fingers.  _They can't find him.  I'm sorry._

Her face was upturned, eyes closed.  _Gone.  _She'd known, since a week ago.  A week.  

_He was a terrific daybreaker.  _

Was.  Sorry.  _Was_

Her love of stars couldn't help her, because she loved him more.  Goddess help her, _she loved him more._

And maybe there'd always been a small part of her, so cynical, that'd known this would've happened.  _You left me, how could you, I loved you—_He was a vampire.  Blood sucking creature of the night and all.  A blockhead, a pig, a male chauvinist, a total jerk—

But he was _her _jerk.  

And now he was dead, and his eyes couldn't spark with that familiar light of arrogance, he could no longer carry himself like he was goddamn superior to everyone else, he couldn't hold her and rock her to sleep and tuck her in and he couldn't tickle her until she screamed mercy.  No more warmth, the heat of his body burning under her fingers, he couldn't touch his mouth to hers, and his mind wouldn't smolder black and gold, because he was dead, he was _dead_

And she was alone.

_We can't find him we were on a mission and then they ambushed us I'm so sorry Mary-Lynette_

Mark and Kestrel and Rowan and Jade, they'd all been deathly worried, eyes wide and afraid and some _pitying _she didn't want their goddamn pity.  They could take their goddamn pity and stick it where the sun don't shine, because he was _dead_, her sun no longer shone for _her, _why did theirs have to shine for _them?  _But still they'd looked at her, Rowan moving to embrace her in a circle of comfort.  Tears threatened, but she'd held it back, shoulders stiffened, eyes staring straight ahead in dry fury.  Kestrel flying at her, pain blossoming across her cheek like a spread of wildfire, nearly taking off her head, burnished gold eyes snapping in anger.  _"Don't you care, you stupid bitch, he was your soulmate—"_

She'd sat there, ankles crossed demurely (_his ankles had been crossed when she'd first seen him, lazing like a sleeping leopard_), eyes stinging and barren.  Hands in her lap.  Staring at the flickering fire.  Fire that was dying down, near gone; there were only glowing embers left.  They'd left her alone

She was outside now, searching for comfort within the stars, in the way the black velvet of night and glimmer of stars and pale moonlight washed over her like an ethereal swell of sorrow.  Her fingers traced the wetness on her cheeks, trails of silver that trickled onto her shirt.  

She was cold.  

_You left me how could you_

_Selfish bitch.  _Kestrel screaming pain and fury and the high keening sound split into her ears, a whining drill, painful, but she was deaf to it.

She couldn't care.

*

He hurt.  He goddamn hurt all over.

Only fear drove him, and anger.  They'd left him behind, his loyal partners.  Yessiree, they had, and when he got back to them, Goddess knew what he would do.  _Tear them apart, step down, crush fragile bones, listen to them scream, make them fucking bleed—_His emotions spiraled out of control, melded with the bittersweet taste of love denied.  _Mare.  _Circle Daybreak and their ho-hum peace and love policies could go fuck themselves.  Humans weren't vermin, they said.  Must not kill humans, they said.  Feed off fucking _animals_, do this, do that.  He just didn't care.  Not anymore.  

Because when it all came down to it, he'd only sacrificed for her.

Sometimes he would wonder about his other life.  His past life, the one where the taste of unwilling blood ran so sweet through his head, a forbidden memory, forbidden fruit.  The girls—oh, how he'd loved the girls.  Tiny, svelte, curvy, wicked girls, witches and shapeshifters, and sometimes even humans.  Human girls, and their fear that stank in his nostrils as he forced them into drunken submission.  And always some part of him wanted it back: the long nights and lazy days and his freedom.  He was power, he was fear, he was Ash Redfern.

_Ash and Mare._

He stumbled through the forests, kicked through rotting piles of leaves that strangely left no rustle as he passed.  The air was stagnant, deathly still, and smelled of the deep, rich scent of earth.  Dark and permeated with roots and home.  _Home.  _It felt like home.  She was near, so _near—_

But the forest didn't let him through, only enclosed him in its everlasting embrace of night.  Night.  He moved through silently, a stalking leopard.  A lazy cat.  _Mare always said that she thought I looked like a lazy cat the first time we met.  _His bones gave their distant ache, somehow so unreal that he paid no attention to it.  Pale moonlight spilled in dapples of silver across gnarled pines and twisted roots.  _She said she thought I was a bastard.  _Something crunched beneath his feet.  _And then she kicked me.  _Dead leaves.  Dead twigs.  Dead.  

_She kicked me, she kissed me.  _He stifled the insane urge to grin.  

Tough business, love.  He closed his eyes, relying on nothing more than sound and smell to guide him down paths and around wicked thornbushes.  What was it that had driven him out (_of his mind_) so far for her?  He would remember those girls during lonely nights, when his bed was cold and he yearned for a companion, he would remember: the way they tasted, their scent, their laughter, feigned or not.  But then he would know only her, remember the fall of silken hair so smooth beneath his fingers, and the way she blushed whenever she caught him staring at her, his eyes trying to remember _everything, _the line of delicate nose, her lower lip and how it stuck out a little more than the top, the stubborn arch of dark brows.  The clear blue eyes, not smoky, nor slanted, nor seductive.  Only untouched, innocent, pure.  He would reach out towards her, touch a fingertip to a curve of cheekbone, and laugh, amused, when the skin heated in embarrassment—and more.

_Mare.  _She was near.  He could almost taste her, the salty tears and the regret and the pain—_don't cry.  Why are you crying?_

The cover of towering trees lifted away from the sky.  Starlight splashed in pale colors: spring green, black crimson, innocent blue.  _Innocent—_

She was ahead.  He could see her, dark hair falling like a weeping willow, spilling to the ground.  It was so much longer now.  He'd been gone too long.

_Damn the Circle.  _

His footsteps made no sound against the tangles of overgrown foxglove and packed road.  Pain twisted in his throat—his pain, her pain.  Only time could tell them apart; they were soulmates, belonged together.  Innocence and sin.  Heaven and hell.  She cried silent tears, tracks of silver that trickled down her cheeks.  He longed to reach out to her, to take her in his arms.  _Love me.  _But his heart was numb inside his chest.  _don't cry Mare—_

She looked up, and his breath froze upon his lips.  But he forced the words out, and they came on an ethereal whisper.  

"Mare."

It was a whisper that she didn't hear.

*

She tried to lift her head, but her mind wouldn't obey her, wanting only to lie down and fall into an uneasy sleep.  She searched for the comforting numbness of shock, but it twisted and slunk and avoided.  _Come back._  The muscles in her neck tightened to the edge of screaming pain, but the breath exploded out of her, and she was looking up, at the stars, at the heavens.  Light blossomed like crimson flowers across her vision; the sky was exploding for her.  A star was dying for her, imploding within itself, compressing time and space until there was nothing left but a dead black hole.  A black hole that sucked the light and life and love out of everything around it.  A parasite.

The red filmed out to a tinted pink.

It reminded her of…something.  A distant memory that the slow movements of her thoughts could not bring itself to touch.  _Pink.  _God, what was she thinking?  She had nothing _pink.  _Pink ruffles, room painted pink, pink nails, pink bubbles, those things were all Bunny.  She was no Bunny.

What she wouldn't have given to be Bunny.  

_Just for a year.  Or forever._

It came back to her, slowly, like a gentle seaside breeze, a seaside breeze that she had never felt before.  The beginnings of warmth pressed against her eyelids, invading and intimate.  Heat flared, at the back of her mind, distant yet real.  Something burned like old gold, shining in gemlike brilliance.  Wet grass pressed against the back of her jeans, and the night air smelled suddenly of old comfort.  Musky, sharp, spice and sunshine—

_Ash._

She stumbled to her feet, breath broken.  Hope fluttered inside her chest like a dying bird with wings snapped in stick-like delicacy.  She didn't think; her lips opened in _something—_fear, joy, anger _how could you do this_—and the air suddenly cloyed thick in her lungs, unmoving and stagnant, suffocating.  Above her, the stars sang their song of silence, and were still.  There was no explosion of light, no dying of the old, no birth of the new.  They reigned in peace, as they had done for eternity, in this eternity, and the forever after.  But now she could only wait as the pain tightened in her chest, so physical that it hurt to _breath_—

There was nothing.

And yet, there _was_

"Ash?"  The whisper wove broken hymns of grief in the dead air.  "Ash, this isn't funny—" Her voice broke. 

There was no one, only herself, alone with the taste of him upon her tongue.

A flutter of butterfly wings, delicate, a touch of fever to her cheek.  She froze, breath laboring as her chest seized up in remembered pain.  If she squinted—yes, if she half-closed her eyes, she thought, she could see him, hair shining like something sun spun in distant moonlight.  And she opened her eyes; he was still there, and yes—if she reached out to him, the film of pink (_pink, _something inside of her giggled in near-hysteria) thickened until it veiled her eyes with thick red, but she could, oh, _she could_

Sense the tangled thorn-forest of iridescent colors  

The darkness in among the gemlike colors, flowing so smooth, like a placid river with death lurking beneath its surfaces

Faded crimson and dulled gold, fragments of jade and washed-out emerald, watery violet-blue 

_Ash!_

The scream was torn from her, echoing and ripped away by cruel power of fate destiny _the stars_

The fate foretold in the stars

_Her _stars.

*

He was fading.

_No.  _But the strands of his mind, the thread of thoughts, they were unraveling, so slowly, but quickening now, so that he could only stand there in the humid night, watch her eyes, those same clear eyes that had once snapped in an irresistible challenge.  No, they weren't clear, because now they clouded over in indescribable emotion.  The scream scored harshly into his ears, cut off into sudden silence, deathly stillness.  She was on her knees, his Mare, legs drawn up into a huddle of protection.  The dark hair that ran down a curve of shoulder shone faintly in the starlight, and he fell down beside her, touched her cheek (_again_), trying to offer some measure of comfort—

_This is all your fault, you bastard_

_I hate you_

Her skin was smooth beneath his fingertips.  Smooth and cold, like marble, eyes blinded with tears, but recognition sparked somewhere inside her gaze, and the same flickered to _life _in him, a small flame, but it was there.  It warmed him, this temporary comfort that she'd unintentionally given to him.  The delicate hand she reached out grazed past the skin of his forehead, and he watched her, trying not to blink, because he knew if he did she would be gone in a heartbeat of regret.  But then he saw the way she reached towards him, cautiously, as if searching, seeking, _blinded_

_No.  _The threads of emotion and feeling that was Ash Redfern whispered in denial.  He couldn't help it; he fell back.

_Mare—_

_Why_

Her fingertips were chewed down to the roots, raggedy.  Oh, how he used to tease her, Mare the worrywart, his Mare...

"Ash?"  The whisper was broken.  "You're...here, aren't you?"

_Yes.  _His mouth shaped the words.  Nothing came out, only a breath of wind.  _I'm here for you.  _Tears fell like rain down onto the wild grass, dewdrops of crystal.  They shattered, disappeared, as they touched so gentle upon the earth.  There was an unfamiliar wetness running down his cheeks.  Something gave a distant ache, but it was all so far away.  _Mare.  Touch me before I fade away..._

She did, almost as if she could read him, read him like a book.  He'd opened himself for her, wicked and hesitant, sins of the past and uncertainty of the future—all had been exposed for her to see.  That same gentle gaze, tender, _loving_, and she was watching him, he was so sure she was, eyes open and aware and wide, almost as if she was scared, and he imagined he could feel her grief, writhing inside his chest like something alive, clawing and ripping and screaming, demanding release.  Nothingness tugged at the unraveling edges of his mind.  _No.  Damn you, I won't go yet._

"_Mare..."_

_I love you._

She smiled.  The comfort of her mind flickered like dancing shadows cast by dying flames.  _Gone.  Come back.  Gone again.  _The slender curve of her neck bowed, as if slowly being crushed, but she _smiled_.  It was a twisted parody of joy.  They were right; he really was a monster, an honorless bastard.  _I promised._

"I know," she said gently, to nothing at all.  _Nothing.  _

_I love you too._

He closed his eyes, and night came to claim what was theirs once again.  A brush of warmth touched against his cheek, so gentle that maybe, just maybe, it was all an illusion, and there was another place, a place where dreams came true and there was only her, lips curved for him, his life given for hers, where death was the second (_only second_) step, and the stars exploded in supernovas of fire and ice, glorious displays of birth and death and rebirth, again and again, in cycles running through years and centuries and eons of endless time.  Love was everlasting, they said—  

And he knew she would always love the night.   

:::=:::=:::

AN II: Believe it or not, this was suppose to be a _very _brief bit of fluff where nothing happens at all.  But somehow it managed to turn into what you just finished reading.  *sweatdrops*  I don't think I can write anything short to save my life...  

Some notes: a few phrases intentionally taken from the original book.  I wanted to tie this back to its roots.  Full circle and all, you know?  Disjointed quality of some thoughts deliberate, stream-of-conciousness effect intended.  LJ Smith was the very first fandom that I became interested in, but I've never written anything until now.  Taking a break from Final Fantasy, you could say.  Again, I want to thank Guardian, altol, and lanesa for sharing their awesome work with FF.net.

Don't forget to leave a review on your way out! :D        

 


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